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Crypto Miners Hated by VR Players as Graphic Cards Sold Out in China

As reported by SINA VR, some VR players find themselves in an awkward situation recently: they have carefully selected all components of their first VR-ready PC but stuck on the GPU part. Almost all high-end GPU are nowhere to be found, even JD, the biggest online 3C shopping site in China, is out of stock. The reason is simple. VR players couldn’t afford the price offered by cryptocurrency miners, who are well funded by the soaring cryptos that are built specifically for GPU mining.

People assembling graphic cards in a miner. (credit:Sina VR)

6 graphic cards in a miner. (credit:Sina VR)

Supply of graphics card has been tight since the beginning of this year but the situation is getting worse in June. Both online and offline stores across China are reported in shortage of graphic card. Price of some highly-demanded GPUs have doubled this year, which has never happened before. It’s said that the GPU wholesalers were hoarding units for higher profits.

Graphic cards are “out of stock” on JD, the biggest online 3C shopping site in China.

Searching on weibo, one can find that VR players are complaining the situation and hoping for a price crash of cryptos.

Jerry:

I gave up. Can’t buy a good graphic card at a proper price across the world…..When will the mining crash? My computer is almost out of service and GPU price rise by over one thousand yuan.

Jiulangya:

Wait. So the shortage of graphic card is caused by the rise of Bitcoin???? WTF!

Wudimiao:

Memory stick rise after SSD rise. Now it’s turn for graphic card. Oh, that’s not true because there is none available.

VR players blame the Bitcoin miners as they are unaware of the difference between GPU miners and Bitcoin ASIC miners.

The most popular GPUs are AMD RX 480/580, NVDIA GTX 1060 as they are the best cost effective option for hashrate generators. AMD RX 580 is built with FinFET 14bm process technology, which makes it less demanding for power and cooling. The price of RX 580 has been pushed from around 2,000 CNY in April to 3,499 in late June, according to Sina VR.

“We built a small GPU mining farm at the end of last year and never bought any new graphic cards ever since. But we are aware that there have been increasing demand for GPU along with the rise of cryptos. The shortage of GPU is definitely driven by crypto miners, that’s for sure. “

The ROI of mining some cryptos is 2 month in its best time, not the mention the residual value of sales from second-hand graphic card.

He said that a big GPU mining farm could host 20,000 miners, each of which carries 5 to 6 pieces of graphic card. That means a mining farm of this size could consume 100,000 to 120,000 graphic cards alone. He also revealed that several mining farm of similar size are under construction in Yunnan province.

Speaking of second-hand graphic card, he also expressed his concern for the re-occurrence of 2014 crash.

“Lots of mining farm shut down from 2014 to 2015 simply because the business was not profitable. The second-hand GPUs were renovated and then sold to the open market. Some people bought them, only to find they were function-less after a short while.”

Recently NVIDIA release a “trimmed” version of graphic card, which has not video output interface.

Li Ang estimated that the shortage of graphic card would ease by the end of 2017.

The shortage of graphics card in China signals a bubble in the cryptocurrency market. A bubble could not last long.

Learn cryptocurrency and digital assets since 2013 and co-founder of 8btc in 2014. Co-author of 2014-2015 Digital Currency Development Report(2015) and first author of Investment Guidelines To Blockchain Digital Currency (Published in June 2017 ISBN:9787300239286).

COMMENTS(68)

1 year agoBitcoinAllBot

Here is the link to the original comment thread. Or you can comment here to start a discussion. Author: 8btccom

Yes, of course. But these days mining is done on mining pools. The pool selects transactions for new block, miners only contribute hash power to mine that new block. For this, they are sometimes called ‘hashers’, not miners.

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 82%. (I’m a bot)

VR players couldn’t afford the price offered by cryptocurrency miners, who are well funded by the soaring cryptos that are built specifically for GPU mining.

VR players blame the Bitcoin miners as they are unaware of the difference between GPU miners and Bitcoin ASIC miners.

As a seasoned miner since 2013, Li Ang told 8btc:. “We built a small GPU mining farm at the end of last year and never bought any new graphic cards ever since. But we are aware that there have been increasing demand for GPU along with the rise of cryptos. The shortage of GPU is definitely driven by crypto miners, that’s for sure.”

As a Chinese investor yep that’s pretty much what I’ve heard too, not just apply to VR players though don’t know where do they get that from, more like gamers in general.

Some of the miners here are really dicks from what I’ve read. Some don’t even buy cards from retails/shopping websites anymore, they fucking drive a truck directly to the factories producing them, blocking their entrance gate and aggressively demand for thousands. Another handful took advantage of the “7 days refund” policy provided by online store such as JD.com, buy some high-end ones mine them for 6 days straight for no money and then return the used product. It takes more than “sold out” to spawn such an outrage to say the least.

Another handful took advantage of the “7 days refund” policy provided by online store such as JD.com, buy some high-end ones mine them for 6 days straight for no money and then return the used product.

Yes, and to add to that, in a few months when the difficulty rises enough, VR players will be able to buy the used high end GPUs that were used for mining.

They will probably be able to get them at a much cheaper price since the miners eventually will need to liquidate everything. I would replace the fans on them though as they would have significant wear on them.

The come down is imminent (not permanent) but it’s like everyone has stars in their eyes.

Edit: feel free to downvote lol, it won’t change the outcome, the crashes are not a bad thing anyways, who doesn’t like a flash sale? And as we all know, the price rarely if ever goes lower than the previous ath.

If you mine BTC, its beyond pointless, its like trading $2 for $1. If you mine alts its still very profitable, and they are Asic proof. However, more people mining each day means share of pay goes down and down.

No, not with a rig. You will need to have a substantial hashrate. Bitcoin mining network has 4,880,241 TH/s. To find a block in reasonable time, say 1 block in 3 days on average, you would need to have 0.3% of that hashrate, or about 15,000TH/s. That’s about 1100 mining rigs that cost $1100 each, or $1,200,000 total.

If you can invest that amount (+infrastructure and running costs), you can try to mine separately.

And when you are running a business like this, you would find out that it is more profitable for you to include transactions that pay more in fees.

Yeah people on r/ethermining were bragging about how they would take advantage of the 3 month refund time on their card and were up voted for it. I miss when that sub was better like a year ago and not full of overconfident retards and braindead people asking how to mine ETH with ASICs.

As reported by SINA VR, some VR players find themselves in an awkward situation recently: they have carefully selected all components of their first VR-ready PC but stuck on the GPU part. Almost all high-end GPU are nowhere to be found, even JD, the biggest online 3C shopping site in China, is out of stock. The reason is simple. VR players couldnt afford the price offered by cryptocurrency miners, who are well funded by the soaring cryptos that are built specifically for GPU mining.http://news.8btc.com/crypto-miners-hated-by-vr-players-as-graphic-cards-sold-out-in-china

I’ve been in this a while man, thats still what I meant though. If the price of BTC is not +2700 (which takes the whole market up with it) and with exponentially increasing difficulty (like right now) You’d make money back in maybe 2 years

Eternal September or the September that never ended is Usenet slang for a period beginning in September 1993, the month that Internet service provider America Online began offering Usenet access to its many users, overwhelming the existing culture for online forums. The influx in Usenet users was also indirectly caused by the aggressive direct mailing campaign by AOL Chief Marketing Officer Jan Brandt in order to beat out CompuServe and Prodigy, which most notably involved distributing millions of floppy disks and CD-ROMs with free trials of AOL.

Before then, Usenet was largely restricted to colleges and universities. Every September, a large number of incoming freshmen would acquire access to Usenet for the first time, taking time to become accustomed to Usenet’s standards of conduct and “netiquette”. After a month or so, these new users would either learn to comply with the networks’ social norms or tire of using the service.

There’s a part of me that wishes I knew how to make ASICs. I would LOVE to build algo-specific ASICs for GPU-bound algorithms. Why?

I would learn a new and super-useful skill (lots of things besides bitcoin need ASICs, it’s one more career field I open to myself)
It gets me closer to the hardware (I have a Computer Science degree because I want to marry hardware and software, my hardware knowledge is decent, but could definately be better)
I’d love few things more than to see Bitmain’s monopoly broken
Mentally, I like optimization and efficiency improvements. If I knew of some task in bitcoin’s client that was slow and needed speeding up (er, one that could be sped up safely) I would totally look into doing it.

It’s a mixture of the bar for entry appearing too far away (I don’t know too many things to start learning on my own efficiently) and a lack of motivation that stops me. I like doing engineering work, I hate the idea of running a company.

Yes, but I’m only running about 1/5 the number of cards (~10) this time.

Mainly because:

the cards about 2x – 3x more powerful, but use the same or less amount of electricity
the cards are also about 2x – 3x as expensive right now because of the boom
I have less room in the house this time for rigs, since we’ve rearranged some things and expanded the home gym

So basically, it’s just a much smaller effort this go around. Probably not worth a video. 🙂

The annual ritual of GPU sacrifice is a tradtition deeply inbedded in the mining cult. Its followers have been practicing it since their prophet founded the cult in 2009. The sacrifce is believed to calm the mining gods so they will be mild on difficulty increases and give great rewards in the coming year.